Businesses are constantly seeking ways to better present their products to the purchasing public. For example, manufacturers of packaged goods sold at retail often favor upright displays of their products or product information in retail outlets for the greater presence and impact made by such displays on purchasers and potential purchasers. This preference sometimes carries over to individual devices used to hold and dispense packages for retail sale. Distributors of novelty items, which often do not have access to shelf space, have long distributed their products by mounting them to placards which may be hung vertically wherever convenient. More recently, in some retail markets, three dimensional dispenser "towers", which may be from less than a foot to well over a foot in height, have been used to hold and dispense small individual packages for retail sale. These towers have sufficient size to carry large printing and graphics for easy reading and strong aisle presence.
One problem with the use of such towers is that shelf space of a sufficient height may not be available to enable the towers to be installed on shelves in their normal, upright orientation. Existing towers are therefore generally supplied with hooks or loops to receive hooks so they may be hung from their rear side on the front of a shelf or from some other support. Such towers are normally designed to gravity feed individual packages within the tower through a relatively small dispensing opening at the bottom of the tower. If shelf height is limited or if the retailer wishes to have the product placed on its shelves near other competitive products for the convenience of shoppers, the tower may have to be placed on a shelf on its side or back or the individual packages may have to be removed from the tower and positioned loose on the shelf. If such towers have to be positioned on their side or back, not only are the advantages of such towers lost, their construction may become a hindrance and annoyance to consumers who have difficulty in attempting to remove individual packages from such devices. If individual packages have to be removed and the towers discarded due to limited shelf height, all potential marketing advantages from such devices are lost and the extra costs that their manufacture entailed are wasted.